New guitar book, practice update for all

4th Grade Green Light (page 7) proves to be more challenging than the Exercise on page 6. We will continue to work on these two songs this Thursday, with the hope of introducing "Woke Up Early" next week. If a student is struggling, continued work on the first 6 steps (4 and 5) will be helpful (but not necessary to practice if a student has mastered them).

On next Friday, any student who wants additional coaching is invited to come to the Butterfly classroom during 2nd recess. I will remind students in class next Thursday.

5th & 6th Grade We are balancing familiar repertoire with new challenges. If a student has mastered something, she or he should seek other material practice. We are still playing from Strings Extraordinaire the following: Harvest Reel, Largo, Tumba, Country Gardens, and Garden Walk. As a challenge, we are beginning German Dance (we played it by sight today). We continue to work on learning a jig by ear in class--this is meant to be challenging and it is; the process is more important than actually learning the jig note by note.

7th & 8th Grade Because of delays in Rise Up Singing shipment, I will be lending each student a copy of Backpacker's Songbook; it has 200 songs and has a page showing dozens of chord shapes. This will be useful in the short term. If a student really likes the book, you may buy it for her or him by sending a check for $6 to WIWS and putting it in my parent or teacher folder (Dolde). Otherwise, I will collect these when Rise Up Singing becomes available (for which we will charge $12). Students are free to explore and practice any song they want. In class we will work on familiar and relatively easy tunes to build up repertoire and confidence: America the Beautiful, Aunt Rhody, Molly Malone, and This Old Man.
We'll continue to work on the 12 bar blues in A.